What are the best camera settings? You ever scroll by a photo and ask the photographer, what settings did you use? Someone said recently, and I kinda giggled, “That’s like walking up to a chef and asking, “How hot was the stove?”
You’ll get an answer, sure, but it doesn’t explain why the risotto tastes like magic. Magic lives in the chef. In photography, it lives in you.
So, what are the best camera settings? There’s a short, cheeky answer: the ones that let your eye see what it wants to see. The numbers – aperture, shutter speed, ISO – they’re just tools, not recipes. They follow your vision, not the other way around.
As photographers, we often obsess over settings. “Which aperture makes my subject pop?” “Do I need ISO 100 or 400?” “What shutter speed freezes the world just right?” All valid questions, but they miss the bigger point: light, shadow, depth, composition. Notice how sunlight spills across a wooden floor at 7 a.m. Notice the way a shadow crawls up a wall like it’s trying to escape. That’s what makes a photo sing and the settings will follow.
So, which settings should you use? The answer: whatever your camera needs to match the light you’re seeing. And that, my friend, changes every day. Every room. Every street corner. Every coffee cup. The best camera settings for this scene are rarely the same as the best settings for that scene because light isn’t consistent, and life isn’t consistent, and that’s exactly the point.
Depth of field is another favourite obsession. Shallow depth of field makes your subject float, dreamy and isolated. Cool. But notice the layers first: the cup on the table, the shadow it casts, the light bouncing off the window behind it. Suddenly, the photo isn’t just a snapshot; it’s a story. And when you finally dial in your aperture, it’s just formalising what you already saw.
And shadows! Oh, the drama of shadows. People treat them like mistakes or accidents, but they’re secretly collaborators. Shadows sculpt your images, add texture, and sometimes steal the scene in the best way possible. A long shadow on a sunny street can feel like poetry. A thin line across a face can hint at mystery. No setting can replace your curiosity about how light behaves.
Want to learn how to cook with light: you don’t even need a camera to practice. Walk around. Sit in a cafe. Watch the world bend in sunlight. The next time you lift your camera, you’ll already know the story you want to tell. The settings become secondary, like seasoning in a great dish, necessary, but not the main flavour.
At Loop, that’s what we focus on. Sure, we cover aperture, shutter speed, and ISO. We even play with studio lighting sometimes. But mostly, we talk about seeing. Observing. Experimenting. Pressing buttons. Laughing at mistakes. And occasionally finding the photo you weren’t even trying to take, the one that surprises you. That’s the magic.
So next time you hear yourself asking, “What are the best camera settings?”, pause. Look around. Notice how light hits a chair, how shadows curl around a fence, how reflections bounce off water. The settings will just help you share what you’re feeling.
Remember: it’s never about the stove. It’s about the chef. And in photography, that chef is you.